ABSTRACT
The word ‘ethnography’ has its provenance in Greek; a combination of the words ‘ethnos’ (‘people’or ‘tribe’) and ‘graphia’ (‘writing’). Literally translated it means ‘writing about a people’ and therein lies a clue as to a central tenet of ethnography, which is to describe in as rich a detail as possible a culture or group of people. The word was first used in English in the 1830s usually synonymously with ‘ethnology’1 and ‘anthropography’;2 it is believed to have originated in Germany. But it was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that the term became adopted in a truly methodological sense; a point to which we will return.
